Edna Queener Proffit Symposium 2025

We had a great time at our department’s annual Edna Queener Proffit Symposium. Rachel and Laura presented their research, and I gave the keynote address on the impact of a mentor. Additionally, Rachel and Inayat were recognized for their presentation awards at NCAS, and Nick was a co-recipient of this year’s Excellence in Biochemistry award given by the chemistry and biology departments. It was a great way to cap off the year!

I delivered a keynote address on how mentorship impacted my career and my life trajectory

Rachel delivered her research talk and was recognized for her first place award at NCAS

Inayat was recognized for second place at NCAS

Nick received the excellence in biochemistry senior award.

Great group of colleagues and sudents!

Howard Research Fellowship 2025

Congratulations to Joey on being selected as a Howard Research Fellow for 2025. Our project this summer is focused on TAOK1, a protein implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders. This is a completely new area of research for me, so I’m excited to learn and explore something new! You can read more about the fellows program and the announcement for this year here:

https://www.campbell.edu/about/leadership/provost/student-research-fellows-program/student-research-fellows-award-recipients/

ACS Organic Division Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship

Very excited to announce that Rachel was awarded a 2025 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry to perform research in our lab over the summer. She’ll be part of a nation-wide cohort of fellows who participate in joint professional development activities this summer and will travel to California in the fall to tour an industrial chemistry company and present her work. Congratulations Rachel on this remarkable accomplishment! You can read the announcement here and learn more about the program:

https://www.organicdivision.org/surf/

NCAS Meeting 2025

Another great time at the NCAS meeting for the Reynolds lab. Laura presented a poster on her Design to Data project, and Rachel and Inayat won first place and second place Derieux awards, respectively, for their oral presentations! Fellow GAINS member Ashley also won an award! It was a great weekend!

Tarhelium Feature

This was a fun feature on my work with hosting ACS Project SEED students for summer research that was published in the NC-ACS section newsletter, the Tarhelium. Project SEED is a great program and I really encourage high school students to take a look, as well as professors to consider hosting a student!

Here is the feature:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13tESWxGmatqT9rGRvjYpiJuEb05_WM3F/view

And here is the Project SEED website:

https://www.acs.org/education/students/highschool/seed.html

Summer Research 2024

Had a blast this summer working with Rachel as part of Campbell’s Howard Research Fellows program and Kyra as part of ACS Project SEED! They made great progress and learned a lot! Looking forward to their presentations coming up, and ready to continue the work this school year!

Rachel giving the Bradford assay a good stare to scare it straight

Those E. coli colonies can’t hide from Kyra!

NSF LEAPS-MPS Award

Very excited to announce that we were awarded a Launching Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS) Grant from the NSF! We’ll be receiving $250,000 over the next 2 years to support our work using thiamine-dependent for asymmetric catalysis. A major goal of the project is to broaden participation in STEM by providing students with greater opportunities for research here at Campbell. We’re excited about the impact this grant will have on our research, and especially the benefits it will bring to our students! Here is the link to the Campbell News release:

https://news.campbell.edu/articles/250k-grant-for-chemistry-research-largest-ever-for-college-of-arts-sciences/

You can also read more about the work in the abstract on the NSF website:

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2417808&HistoricalAwards=false

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